Ever catch yourself keying a phone number from layout or gestural memory rather than numerical memory ? Cool. Bravo! to ATT and Mental Floss, for a peek into the 1960’s era user testing when phone designers were puzzling over how to redesign a ubiquitous tool… replacing the telephone dial with push-buttons. Turns out the winner, the 3X3+1 layout of the modern telephone was not the most efficient design, nor the closest to the existing pattern, but merely the mostly generally pleasing overall according to the folks on the other side of the glass.

More information and data are at (and via) Mental_Floss and Gizmodo.